Reading Lolita in Tehran
Nabokov's Lolita was not the only book Professor Nafisi's seven girls read and discussed in class. They also studied novels by such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Jane Austen. Usually the female characters in these drew the girls' interest, because they could compare their own lives in Iran to fictional women of the Western world.
But the comparison was not often pleasant. When the Islamic Republic was established in Iran, women were forced to wear veils and long robes to hide their bodies. A woman was not to be seen on the street with a man unless he was a close relative or her husband. Ayatollah Khomeini hated the Western culture and had taken away the women's freedom that their mothers and grandmothers had once enjoyed.
Then the eight-year war between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Khomeini's Iran only made things worse. Writers and intellectuals became the targets of Islamic government. Professor Azar Nafisi, a woman who had studied in America, gave up teaching at the University of Tehran because she refused to wear a veil in the classroom. Instead, she began a class at her own home where she and seven female students could take off their veils and discuss the "forbidden works of Western literature."
Much of Nafisi's inspiration to continue teaching came from her "magician", another professor who had left the University and was in hiding. Because of the student demonstrations and protests, the university was shut down for a period. Some of Nafisi's girl students were kept in jail for up to five years, and one of them was finally executed. Reasons were never given for these actions.
The Lolita story has its similarities to women in Iran during the revolution. Its narrator, Humbert, continually seduces his 12-year old step-daughter after her mother dies. To Azar Nafisi, this suggested that "Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with a man you loath...you make your mind blank... you pretend to be somewhere else...you hate your body." This was figuratively the plight of the veiled women in Iran.
Azar Nafisi left Iran in 1997 and is now teaching English literature at
John Hopkins University. She lives in Washington D.C. with her husband and
two children. Reading Lolita in Tehran was published in 2003.